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Anthropology Free-For-All

There Was An Attempt To Buy Instant Coffee

September 14, 2025 101 Comments

Specifically, in a London branch of Sainsbury’s:

Coffee in case in Sainsburys store in London

( saphling ) pic.twitter.com/rEEE1LpEpH

— London & UK Street News (@CrimeLdn) September 13, 2025

It does, I think, capture the absurdity of where we are.

For those blissfully unfamiliar with the phenomenon above and how it came to be, broader context can be found here. Along with some telling contortions from our progressive betters.

And from which, this:

And so, the preferred, progressive trajectory, as implied above, entails a more demoralised, more dangerous, low-trust society. In which pretty much anything one might wish to buy will be out of reach or shuttered away, and in which every customer will by default be treated as suspicious. Because apparently, we mustn’t acknowledge a difference between the criminal and the law-abiding. Except, that is, to imagine them as more vulnerable than we are.

We will lock up the product, but not the thief. And utopia will surely follow.

Ms [Martha] Gill is not alone, of course. According to her Guardian colleague Owen Jones, expecting persistent shoplifters to face consequences for their actions is now among “the worst instincts of the electorate.” Because shoplifters are “traumatised,” apparently. The real victims of the drama.

At which point, a thought occurs. If repeated thieving is so high-minded and so easily excused, perhaps Ms Gill and Mr Jones would be good enough to publish their home addresses, the whereabouts of any valuables, and the times at which they’re likely to be out, or at least preoccupied or unconscious.

Or do our betters only disdain other people’s property?

See also, the Progressive Retail Experience series, a recurring feature of Fridays here, and whose entries currently number 666.

Update, via the comments:

Jen quotes this, from the post linked above,

Ms Gill is not alone, of course. According to her Guardian colleague Owen Jones, expecting persistent shoplifters to face consequences for their actions is now among “the worst instincts of the electorate.” Because shoplifters are “traumatised,” apparently. The real victims of the drama.

She adds, drily,

“The Guardian: wrong about everything, all the time.”

Well, it’s quite the feat to construe brazen and habitual thieves who merrily degrade the lives of those around them – the ones sexually assaulting retail staff and brandishing machetes – as somehow being the victims of the drama, the ones deserving of our empathy and indulgence, the ones who shouldn’t be punished.

While blaming the law-abiding, on whom they prey.

And while pretending not to know that the kinds of people who thieve and loot repeatedly, dozens or hundreds of times, often while visibly exulting in a sense of power, an ability to menace others, are quite likely to behave in other vividly anti-social ways. And while somehow ignoring the damning statistics of her own chosen sources.

I mean, even by the standards of the Guardian and Observer, that’s some pretty solid perversity. One might, for instance, contrast Ms Gill’s article, or that of Mr Jones, with all available statistical data, with the accounts of the victims, and with actual footage of the crimes in question – I’ve shared 666 examples to date – and then behold the utterly jarring dissonance.

As I said in an earlier thread,

Progressive wrongness is, it seems to me, often of a particular type. It isn’t just unrealistic or factually incorrect or logically or morally incoherent. There’s very often a sense of contrivance and perversity, of wrongness via effort, suggesting a psychology one might find worthy of study.

And Ms Gill’s Observer article is littered with quite glaring factual and logical errors – things that a professional journalist should know and which are easily found out. And yet she somehow doesn’t know, or pretends not to know, and makes no effort whatsoever to check. Because moral perversity is, among her peers, much more statusful.

Again, a psychology worthy of study.

Consider this an open thread. Pick a subject, any subject.

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Ephemera

Friday Ephemera (784)

September 12, 2025 165 Comments

A project for the weekend, requires detergent sprinkles. || Oh, I dunno, a little picky, methinks. || Improbable levitation. || Why, what did you see? || So how was your day? || You don’t get to, says she. || She’s looking for the perfect liberal. Note obligatory pinching of fingers. || “Sneaking… Mum’s underwear,” says he. || Schoolgirling scenes. || Signage issues. || Signs of enrichment. || Hugging occurred. || Mr Hopper liked to wear his sister’s clothes, but that’s not the detail you’re going to remember. || For everything, a time and a place. || Guitar playing, simplified. || Moustachioed woman has thought. || Mistakes were made. || Birds of the night. || Highway intervention. || Just another fifty times, dear human. || And finally, via Elephants Gerald, big-hair Kirk and the milk-stealing Klingons.

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Academia Free-For-All Those Poor Darling Shoplifters

The Violation Of Others

September 9, 2025 180 Comments

And in expensive and statusful education news:

At The New School in Manhattan, students can enrol in a four-credit sociology seminar titled “How to Steal,” reflecting broader trends on college campuses where theft is reframed as protest or survival.

It’s protest, you hear. Albeit of a gratuitous and self-serving kind.

The course is framed as an academic exploration of morality, politics, power, and what it calls the “aesthetics of theft.”

Because in order to titillate pinhead students and their pinhead lecturers, you need to frame selfishness and moral squalor as sexy and upscale, and ever-so daring. It’s “radical ethics,” you see.

Fieldwork requires students to visit grocery stores, banks, libraries, and museums, which the course identifies as places where “capital is hoarded and value is contested.”

Unlike modish Manhattan universities that applaud themselves as “a place for fearless progress,” and whose lecturers glamourise shoplifting and the self-satisfied violation of other, better people.

The seminar, since you ask, is the work of Cresa Pugh, a woman who lives in Brooklyn, obviously, and who boasts of “decolonising” and “interrogating” many things, while arriving at entirely predictable conclusions.

The New School’s seminar joins a growing number of higher education programmes promoting anti-capitalist perspectives.

You see, being a grubby, antisocial prick and stealing from a library or grocery store is giving it to the man, man.

At which point, readers are invited to imagine Ms Pugh being robbed in broad daylight – a bag-snatching or phone-snatching or possibly a mugging – and her subsequent search for some aesthetic in the experience. 

And because sometimes the punchlines just write themselves:

The New School charges more than $60,000 in annual tuition… At its per-credit rate, students will pay over $10,000 to enrol in the seminar.

Previously – on needless, habitual mooching as a radical lifestyle thang.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

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Reheated

Reheated (114)

September 8, 2025 96 Comments

From the archives, some items of possible interest:

No Escape From Now.

On historically accurate casting – and its opponents.

I’m not at all sure what historical inclusivity might mean, given the racial demographics of rural England at the time of Brontë and Austen, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, what Ms Flint seems to want sounds more like ahistorical inclusivity. And whether incongruous, politically corrected racial casting choices constitute “imagination,” rather than a following of Very Modern Fashion, is a question I leave to the reader…

It is, needless to say, slightly surreal to see supposedly serious productions sharing behind-the-scenes footage, in which we’re invited to admire the craft of the set decorators, production designers, costume designers, etc., and their detailed, punctilious recreations of the period, while the people wearing the costumes and striding about the sets are demographically bizarre. As if we’re not supposed to notice.

Ladylike Behaviour.

And in transgender-sex-offender-urine-hurling news.

The chap in question – known, by himself, as “Sophie Koko” – originates from Kazakhstan and boasts an extensive history of sexual offences, numbering over fifty. His leisure activities – outside of bottling his own urine and then spraying it on children – include searching out articles about his crimes and then threatening any commenters who dare to “misgender” him.

Despite his prodigious criminal activity, often repeated in the same locations, Mr Koko – complete with bicycle and polka-dot dress – proved difficult to apprehend. Possibly due to the public being told by both the police and the media that the person engaging in such activities, and for whom they should be alert, was somehow a woman.

Have You Tried Storing Them Upright?

Crime, incarceration, and dubious conclusions.

Readers will note the odd implication that the level of serious criminal behaviour at any given time should somehow conform to the amount of prison space you have at that time. As if the moral gravity of a criminal act, and likelihood of recidivism and danger to the public, should be determined by whether or not you can be bothered to build another dungeon.

Little Harmony, Plenty Colon.

Attention, music lovers. Has your singing been decolonised?

As the only racial group being explicitly excluded is Old Whitey, the obvious inference is that the cause of all this alleged misery and “trauma” is the party being excluded. As if the mere proximity of People Of Pallor would inhibit and befoul any creative endeavour, any glimmer of “joy.” Given the minority status of white people in London, it seems a bit much. And ever so slightly ungrateful.

And it is, I think, worth noting that the nation’s capital, where these dramas of “resistance” unfold, has in my lifetime gone from a native white-majority city, over 90%, to a native white-minority one, around 35%. Yet it would seem that even this dramatically downsized white devil population is, for some, still too burdensome and oppressive. A cause of “collective trauma.”

You May Need To Write This Down.

From the world of niche pornography.

To summarise: Opportunist female porn models who pretended to be men pretending to be women, to thereby rake in lots of cash, have annoyed actual men who pretend to be women, including men who pretend to be women while making pornography.

See, I bring you the wonders of the world.

The ladies’ act of presenting themselves as the opposite sex, albeit with extra steps, was not, it seems, deemed affirming by those who like to present themselves as the opposite sex.

“My gender isn’t your costume,” said this chap here, a self-styled “eGirl, but like, with a penis or whatever.” Other indignant rumblings included accusations of deception and fraud, the inevitable “transphobia,” and demands that the ladies in question “don’t get in our space.” Another bewigged gentleman denounced the “masquerade” as “disgusting.”

For those craving more, this is a pretty good place to start.

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Ephemera

Friday Ephemera (783)

September 5, 2025 198 Comments

Well, at least her phone was okay. || Hers may be the biggest I’ve ever seen. || Hoovering of note. || I vote for the magic bucket. || “Over 80% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border.” || Oh look, bubbles. || Bristol’s bonfire kids, 1962. || Not unfair. || Nommy-nommy-nom. || A use of other people’s time and money. || The rapid sorting of tomatoes. Also, potatoes. || At last, toilet-paper mushrooms. || More peer-reviewed scholarship. || Inapt fap. || Space reserved. || The progressive retail experience, parts 659, 660, 661, 662, 663, 664, 665 and 666. || Parking scenes. || Unlikely leaf propellant. || Thing that never happens happens again. || The right tool. || Sights of London. || Newcomers. || And finally, on making The Wizard of Oz – a tale of fires, amphetamines and asbestos snow.

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In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.